The Secret Teacher: ‘Selling the mentally taxing option of critical thinking to modern youngsters is often met with resistance’

“Thirty-five years?! Did you say 35, miss?”

And when I didn’t answer immediately Daniel visibly bounced in his seat as he turned to check with everyone behind him: “did she say 35?”. Daniel is in the front row for a reason, and while that tests my patience on a daily basis, he is also more comfortable in his own skin than any other 15-year-old I’ve ever taught. This makes him a wonderful role model too. Mostly, anyway, and so his authentic and lively personality filled the room as he failed to hide his shock at how long I intended to spend at school.

A quieter student, Eve, asked if that included my own schooldays and college, and Daniel threw her a look of gratitude before turning to me for a short-lived moment of victory. Because it didn’t. From there someone else remembered I had told them once about studying for a master’s and so we worked out how many years of full- and part-time study I had completed. Many students joined in Daniel’s expression of shock that anyone would study voluntarily once their compulsory schooling had ended. Let alone again and again as the revelation of additional certificates and diplomas completely confounded some of them.

Not everyone, though, and I knew that the many who remained quiet were more than open to a long-standing commitment to learning and just not ready to say so out loud in front of their peers. Many of these students were perhaps aware of the same thing I was, namely, that the arguments expressed may have demonstrated disinterest in formal learning, but the process they were using involved exemplary use of two of the most crucial ingredients for learning: curiosity and critical thinking.

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Lively young minds are a beautiful thing to be in the presence of, and when curiosity has been nourished rather than quashed, every qualification I have is rigorously tested. In psychologically safe learning environments it is possible for us all to explore many possible answers. Regrettably, many youngsters receive the message that only the right answer will do and will remain quiet unless absolutely confident they have it. They wait patiently until someone offers it and the teacher affirms it so that they can write it down. Many don’t understand it and haven’t grasped how it was arrived at, but they have the correct answer and that is what they have been told is valued, so that’s enough for them.

The alternative to this is a space in which young people are guided in critical thinking, which is far messier than you could possibly imagine. Students today are avid tech users and think nothing of demanding high-speed service from humans, too, despite us not being programmed to deliver it. Technology almost always guarantees speed and certainty, and that we have become so dependent on it is evident from how truly difficult many find it to be without their phone. So the task of selling the slower and more mentally taxing option of critical thinking to modern youngsters is frequently met with resistance.

School isn’t the life sentence young people make it out to be when they sigh and groan at how impossible it all is

As teachers we know how we want our lessons to play out, but there’s faint hope of it happening with the content landing on so many diverse recipients, each with their own take on it and their particular learning style and needs. In precisely the same way as I have an ideal plan for the lesson, so too do they. My team-teaching partnership involves discussion and negotiation before we two agree on the plan that we take into the class. We have managed each other’s expectations of how things should go and are prepared with what we truly believe is the best way forward.

Not so the 25-strong class, each individual armed with their own ideas, but having run them by precisely nobody. The more spontaneous students shoot hands into the air on hearing our first words. As agreed, we ignore these, absolutely confident that the answers to those questions will be revealed if we can just continue to speak. The next voices are usually those protesting that something from a previous (related) lesson has been forgotten or mislaid, and that this will be an obstacle to engaging in or completing this task. There is a very particular tone of glee that often accompanies such news; youngsters simply cannot hide their delight at possessing an exit pass from work. These passes are not always valid, however, as time taken to respond to that typically involves finding the work or handout that had been reported irretrievably lost.

[ The Secret Teacher: Our students used to be more content in themselves ]

Once we get started there is usually a period of relative calm until we start to notice that some have been cleverly hiding the fact that they have not yet started. This risks slowing down our plan and/or frustrating the students who have almost finished, and we aim to proceed in a way that minimises both outcomes. Such scenes truly are a feature of a typical day.

And in such scenes the demands we make on our students are high, but so too are theirs on us. For us each to remain committed to our respective roles asks us all to dig deep, whether that is for six years or 35.

School isn’t the life sentence young people make it out to be when they sigh and groan at how impossible it all is. And many will find that to give school a chance builds openness to a lifetime of learning, often in a more formal context. They will even start to take pleasure in it at a young age.

Any typical school day is just one of hundreds in a student’s time at secondary. And thousands in a teacher’s career.